BEDE GRIFFITHS

When in 1992 Bede Griffiths came to Winchester to speak at the Mystics and Scientists conference, I invited Keith Ward down from Oxford to meet him. Keith began by saying that his students did not think such a person as Father Bede could exist! Father Bede was highly amused, but Keith's students were right in thinking that Father Bede embodied something unique in his 'marriage of East and West'. His life had begun in the West, with its Oxford training under C.S. Lewis, but in the 1950s he had travelled to India to find 'the other half of his soul'. Even as a young man, Bede had been at odds with a culture that had lost its sense of the sacred, so he and his friends experimented with a life of rugged simplicity in the Cotswolds just after coming down from Oxford. This experience set Bede on his spiritual quest, which lasted for the rest of his life.

Father Bede at first considered this life of dialogue as a reconciliation between intuition and poetic imagination on the one hand, and analytical reason on the other. He felt that the West had overdeveloped the latter at the expense of the former, and that a better balance should be sought. In the 1950s he engaged with Schuon and Guenon's writings on the transcendent unity of religions, at first criticising Schuon for putting the intuitive intellect above faith at a time when he also insisted that Christianity was the fulfilment of other religions. He later came to understand Schuon's ideas more clearly, and moved towards a complementarity model of comparative religions, especially when he came to appreciate the depth of the Advaita tradition that encouraged people to go beyond the mode of the rational mind to experience the divine mystery.

Mystery was an important theme to Father Bede, especially what he calls the mystery of love or even the ocean of love that lies behind the phenomenal universe and which he himself experienced intensely, especially towards the end of his life. His relationship to this mystery was one of surrender, which he relates to the life and death of Christ, and to which he was called more deeply in the last few months of his life. Mystery draws us beyond concept and image, a process that is mediated by the symbol, which literally means 'throw together'. Trapnell's discussion of symbolism drawing on Father Bede's insights is one of the most valuable aspects of his book. As he puts it: 'Religious symbols, as both expressions of divine mystery and apprehensions of meaning, guide the mind's return to experience the same mystery' (p. 159).

For Father Bede, openness to symbolic self-transcendence is vital if life is not to be fragmented and cut off from its source. The danger for Christianity is that it has translated experiences into words and words into thoughts so that people begin to think that these words and thoughts are themselves the object of faith when we should let them go and move beyond them. Thus faith has become identified with assent to a body of dogmatic claims rather than a direct encounter with the living God. This also means that theology itself is pursued as a function of the same rational mind that pursues science. Bede challengingly defines science as the lowest form of knowledge in that it represents a knowledge of the material world through discursive reason. Philosophy is superior in addressing the realm of thought but is still confined to discursive reason. Theology should be open to the world of transcendent reality if it is to be more than philosophy, while only wisdom can transcend the rational mind and know truth directly at a level where knowing is being. The movement is always to a place beyond form, image and concept. Hence the use of the metaphor of darkness beyond light for this process.

This highest state is nevertheless for Bede a communion rather than an identity of being, or, as he later expressed it, a sense of non-duality as reflected by Jesus in his saying that 'I and my Father are One'. As Father Bede explained in his Winchester lectures, this realisation was deepened by his experience of the feminine following his first stroke. He felt himself overwhelmed with love, and those in his presence could sense this very clearly in his emanation. Jordan Trapnell would have been personally enriched by this experience, which does not fully emerge from his fine scholarly book. For Bede, Universal Wisdom is inseparable from Universal Love. And this wisdom and love are the Centre in which we can dwell when the ego is displaced: 'There is a window in my consciousness where I can look out on eternity, or rather where this eternal Reality looks out on the world of space and time through me'.

This book is essential reading for those who want to understand the deeper significance of Father Bede's life and thought. The author's familiarity with the issues and their wider context enriches the reader's appreciation of the process that Father Bede embodied if his life itself is seen as a symbol of the dialogue or marriage about which he also wrote.